The aim of this paper is to address the issue of the Transition in Italy proposing some thoughts about the possible links between economy, trade and animals. Connections that could be in some way ...explained by using zooarchaeological finds as a narrative source.
More properly this is a sort of notes for research agenda, arisen from an heterogeneous national panorama, represented by more than seven hundred and sixty thousand fragments, recovered in nearly four hundred different archaeological contexts, analysed in Italy since the seventies until today.
To this national sample have been applied analysis according to different kind of data, trying to assess two main orders of information: 1) the diachronic changes of the proportional incidence of the main livestock taxa (Cattle, Caprine and Pig); 2) the frequencies of the sites, within specific temporal ranges, where some particular taxa and ecological groups were found (like salt-water fish, exotic animals, wild species in urban layers).
The results obtained with this quantitative methodological approach, allow to propose some working hypothesis concerning breeding, fishing, hunting, growing and decline of trade, alimentary practice, diseases, play and some other anthropic behaviour.
After forty years of archaeozoological research in Italy, it seems that there are several evidences that display a transformation in human-animals interactions between the end of antiquity and the beginning of Middle Ages.
According to the data collected up to now, Early Middle Ages seems as a long period marked by an economic system enclosed between two economic set-ups: the Late Antiquity and the low/late medieval. These two ages, as animals remains reveal, show instead some deep similarities.
The arrival of the Lombards in Italy marks the sudden rise of the attestations of tombs provided with grave goods, even if this custom was not unknown to the indigenous populations: they practiced it ...since the remote past and, with subsequent modifications, continued to do until the end of Antiquity (Paroli 2008, p. 203; Reggiani and Rizzi 2007, p. 464). Despite the general consensus amongst researchers in associating this phenomenon with the Lombard settlement, their positions regarding the ethnographic, historical, social and economic implications are very different. The heterogeneity of these opinions seems to result from the diffusion within Medieval
Animal Bones Marco Valenti; Frank Salvadori
Breaking and Shaping Beastly Bodies,
03/2007
Book Chapter
The Medieval Archaeology Section of the University of Siena has been engaged in the study of early medieval rural settlements for more than twenty years. Research has followed a strategy based on ...landscape surveys (so far we have covered about 9% of Tuscany), detailed catalogues of all published material and a number of long-term open area excavations. This has led to the elaboration of the “Tuscan model”, as it is often defined by the Italian archaeological community: a historiographical model that is frequently discussed and considered to be a crucial point in the early medieval settlement debate. Its main points
Brain Aβ deposition is a key early event in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer´s disease (AD), but the long presymptomatic phase and poor correlation between Aβ deposition and clinical symptoms remain ...puzzling. To elucidate the dependency of downstream pathologies on Aβ, we analyzed the trajectories of cerebral Aβ accumulation, Aβ seeding activity, and neurofilament light chain (NfL) in the CSF (a biomarker of neurodegeneration) in Aβ-precursor protein transgenic mice. We find that Aβ deposition increases linearly until it reaches an apparent plateau at a late age, while Aβ seeding activity increases more rapidly and reaches a plateau earlier, coinciding with the onset of a robust increase of CSF NfL. Short-term inhibition of Aβ generation in amyloid-laden mice reduced Aβ deposition and associated glial changes, but failed to reduce Aβ seeding activity, and CSF NfL continued to increase although at a slower pace. When short-term or long-term inhibition of Aβ generation was started at pre-amyloid stages, CSF NfL did not increase despite some Aβ deposition, microglial activation, and robust brain Aβ seeding activity. A dissociation of Aβ load and CSF NfL trajectories was also found in familial AD, consistent with the view that Aβ aggregation is not kinetically coupled to neurotoxicity. Rather, neurodegeneration starts when Aβ seeding activity is saturated and before Aβ deposition reaches critical (half-maximal) levels, a phenomenon reminiscent of the two pathogenic phases in prion disease.
Current Web-based Services are highly heterogeneous not only on data but also with regard to service interaction. Despite their heterogeneity, composition of these services is required in order to ...achieve additional functionality. Semantic descriptions and composition algorithms for heterogeneous services have been recently proposed. However, existing techniques do not take the Publish/Subscribe paradigm in consideration or do not offer sufficient support for interaction through hypermedia controls as required in the REST architectural style. This paper presents a composition architecture and two techniques, re-planning, and replication, for support of REST and Publish/Subscribe services by composition algorithms. We apply these techniques to a state of the art graph-based composition algorithm and evaluate the impact on performance.
Purpose
This paper describes a software architecture that automatically adds semantic capabilities to data services. The proposed architecture, called OntoGenesis, is able to semantically enrich data ...services, so that they can dynamically provide both semantic descriptions and data representations.
Design/methodology/approach
The enrichment approach is designed to intercept the requests from data services. Therefore, a domain ontology is constructed and evolved in accordance with the syntactic representations provided by such services in order to define the data concepts. In addition, a property matching mechanism is proposed to exploit the potential data intersection observed in data service representations and external data sources so as to enhance the domain ontology with new equivalences triples. Finally, the enrichment approach is capable of deriving on demand a semantic description and data representations that link to the domain ontology concepts.
Findings
Experiments were performed using real-world datasets, such as DBpedia, GeoNames as well as open government data. The obtained results show the applicability of the proposed architecture and that it can boost the development of semantic data services. Moreover, the matching approach achieved better performance when compared with other existing approaches found in the literature.
Research limitations/implications
This work only considers services designed as data providers, i.e., services that provide an interface for accessing data sources. In addition, our approach assumes that both data services and external sources – used to enhance the domain ontology – have some potential of data intersection. Such assumption only requires that services and external sources share particular property values.
Originality/value
Unlike most of the approaches found in the literature, the architecture proposed in this paper is meant to semantically enrich data services in such way that human intervention is minimal. Furthermore, an automata-based index is also presented as a novel method that significantly improves the performance of the property matching mechanism.
The level of expression of secondary sexual characters has been suggested to signal male ability to resist parasitic infestations. To test this idea, several studies have examined the link between ...sexual signals and immunocompetence in birds. However, most of them have used only a single aspect of immune response to evaluate immunocompetence. We investigated the relation between bill colour and immunocompetence in captive male European blackbirds, Turdus merula, during the breeding season by assessing both cell-mediated and humoral components of the immune system. The blackbird is a sexually dimorphic species with bill colour varying from yellow to orange in males. Humoral immunity was assessed by measuring both primary and secondary responses to sheep red blood cell inoculation. Cell-mediated immunity was estimated with a delayed cutaneous hypersensitivity response to an injection of a mitogen (phytohaemagglutinin). No relation was found between male bill colour and the primary humoral response. However, males with orange bills showed a lower secondary humoral response but a higher cell-mediated immune response than males with yellow bills. Thus, the relation between immunocompetence and a secondary sexual trait may differ markedly depending on which component of the immune system is under consideration. We discuss our results in relation to mechanisms involved in sexual selection. Copyright 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour
Purpose
This paper aims to propose a method based on Linked Data and Semantic Web principles for composing microservices through data integration. Two frameworks that provide support for the proposed ...composition method are also described in this paper: Linkedator, which is responsible for connecting entities managed by microservices, and Alignator, which aligns semantic concepts defined by heterogeneous ontologies.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed method is based on entity linking principles and uses individual matching techniques considering a formal notion of identity. This method imposes two major constraints that must be taken into account by its implementation: architectural constraints and resource design constraints.
Findings
Experiments were performed in a real-world scenario, using public government data. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed method and that, it leverages the independence of development and composability of microservices. Thereby, the data provided by microservices that adopt heterogeneous ontologies can now be linked together.
Research limitations/implications
This work only considers microservices designed as data providers. Microservices designed to execute functionalities in a given application domain are out of the scope of this work.
Originality/value
The proposed composition method exploits the potential data intersection observed in resource-oriented microservice descriptions, providing a navigable view of data provided by a set of interrelated microservices. Furthermore, this study explores the applicability of ontology alignments for composing microservices.
Semantic Data-Driven Microservices Salvadori, Ivan Luiz; Huf, Alexis; Siqueira, Frank
2019 IEEE 43rd Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)
1
Conference Proceeding
Nowadays, data is seen as one of the most valuable assets of organizations. Representing and exposing data in a suitable manner is mandatory for allowing consumers – either human beings or software ...systems – to properly retrieve and interpret such data. Web Services along with semantic Web techniques may be adopted to address this issue. This paper presents the semantic data-driven microservice, a cloud service capable of providing linked data based on non-semantic data sources. Its main goal is to work as a solution for publishing linked data and for maximizing data reuse.
Companies, government, and even ordinary people have been producing and publishing huge amounts of data. This phenomena, known as big data, leveraged the interest in advanced analytics and data ...science. Many observers, though, are pointing out that extracting knowledge from such datasets requires suitable tools for handling and integrating data. Research in the last years has shown that taking into account the semantics of data is crucial for fostering data integration solutions. However, there is a lack of solutions for data publishing that follow the best practices for exposing and connecting data. With this regard, this work proposed DLaaS, an infrastructure for generating and publishing linked data on the Web. It aims at facilitating the execution of necessary processes to properly publish high quality linked data. Its main goal is to improve the reuse of data by connecting entities based on heterogeneous datasets that share a certain level of data intersection or semantic relationship.
